One of the sounds French is famous for is the R sound in words like frère. Interestingly, as late as the French revolution French didn't have this sound and only developed it later in the 1800s. Some say it spread from French to German, Danish and some dialects of Swedish

One interesting feature of Norman French is that it retained the hard C sound (found in words like cat). Over time in other parts of France this sound would evolve into more of a soft sound and be written as ch, which you can see in modern French "chateau"

Language learning apps are great! But sometimes you just want the reckless abandon of watching a video in your target language that is made by a fluent speaker of the language and just facing the challenge 😀

It's the only writing system that I think is more difficult to learn than English (which hasn't properly been updated since the 1300s). Tibetan spelling hasn't been updated since the the 700s. You write Bka'-rgyud but say Kagyu

The German word for mastiff is "Dogge" and was borrowed from English. The French word "dogue" (also meaning mastiff) also comes from English

What are you obsessed about?

Hey guys. I have been posting on Bluesky for a few months now. Do you guys want memes, fun facts about language, or meme and fun facts? Suggestions and comments welcome :)

What other interesting animal names do you know about?

English developed on an island. It was settled by Celts, then Germanic tribes (such as the Angles and Saxons), then the Vikings came in, and then the Normans. Latin also had an influence thanks to Christianity. English has words from all over

The word "gar" also features in the first line of Beowulf "Hwæt, we Gardena in geardagum" which means "Listen, we Spear-Danes in days of old"

Yakuza get their name from a Japanese card game. The hand with 8-9-3 (ya-ku-za in older Japanese) gives you the worst possible hand and thus useless. One theory is that this word came to mean "useless" and then was applied to the group itself

The Vikings were a fearsome and infamous group of seafarers and raiders from Scandinavia who terrorised England and France (Scandinavians who settled in France became the Normans) and many other places in Europe who lived on the Mediterranean coast

I didn't realise that the word "undermine" comes from literally mining under something

Me: Brain, how do you say "good" in Gaelic Brain: Bueno Me: That's Spanish!

"Hey, how do you write "pope" in English" "Potato" "Thanks" "papa" in Spanish is both "leader of the Catholic church" and "potato"

French spelling is a bit unintuitive because it's spelled the way it was pronounced centuries ago and hasn't been updated. And there are things like aux in it which require an explanation. Still ruled based though and nothing like the chaos of English spelling

Phonemes are the smallest building blocks of words. Often a single written letter is one phoneme but sometimes you need multiple letters for a single sound like “sh”, which can be written as /ʃ/ with the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA. So "ship" would be /ʃɪp/ in IPA

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"Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir" is a tablet composed around 1750 BC. It was dug up in the 1920s by Sir Leonard Woolley and translated A. Leo Oppenheim in 1954. It became famous because it seems strangely modern and shows that some parts of life haven't really changed. Part 2 in the comments

Translation fail

What is the best programming language? Not C#, or Java or C++ but which language should one use for identifiers and methods? Would Sanskrit give my code better vibes? 🤔

Explore sign languages and kangaroo words in the latest issue of Silly Linguistics available right here sillyli.ng/8PfEuO

Pictured are Finnish, Sami and Hungarian The word "language" Northern Sami: giella Finnish: kieli Hungarian: nyelv They are all Uralic languages but Hungarian has changed a lot more than the other ones

The headline should read "Benjamin Blümchen trötet wieder" which means "Benjamin Blümchen trumpets again". Except it says "Benjamin Blümchen tötet wieder" which means "Benjamin Blümchen kills again"

Oh boy. Colloquial language is complicated

"gh" in words like "light", "might", "right" used to be pronounced (similar to how "ch" in loch is pronounced) and is related to the "ch" sound in German words like "Licht", "Macht" and "Recht". "delight" actually comes from "delite" and not is not Germanic at all

Terry Pratchett was the best

Did you know that salad, sausage, sauce, salsa and salary all come from the Latin word for salt?